VICTOR
by
Daniel John
I stood in the gray rain in
front of the newspaper machines. One of the Seattle papers
was better than the other, but I had forgotten which. I
finally picked one, dropped my quarters in, pulled out the
paper—“You know where you belong,” a deep male voice said
from right behind me. I knew better than to turn around. I
threw the paper in the trash and raced up the stairs to the
maternity ward. I arrived just in time to see the doctor
roll the IV station, rattling and clanking, over to
Deborah. She was pale, miserable, and nine-and-a-half
months pregnant. Her belly was impossibly large.
“It's time,” she'd said earlier that day in the dimness
before dawn, then leaned over the edge of the bed and
vomited on the floor. I quickly cleaned it up. She rolled
slowly and heavily onto her feet. “Be sure to call Victor.”
“Who's Victor?” I'd never known a Victor.
“Who's Victor?” she asked, as though I knew. I looked at
her, mystified. “I don't know any Victor!” she said,
irritated that I kept bringing it up. I tactfully turned
away. In silence we got ready to go to the hospital for the
birth of our third child, Lilith Mariah Pele.
I'd always had extended conversations with my babies when
they were in the womb, but talking to Lilith was a torrent
of delight. She was soft as a warm breeze, endless as ocean
and formless as fire. And as talkative as a rivulet; she
kept me up with her sparkling chatter. I couldn't imagine
how something that female could survive penned up inside
the matter-of-fact hardness of flesh. For Lilith, being
born would be like being buried alive. I hadn't told
Deborah I expected a stillbirth.
“We have to chemically induce labor,” the doctor was
telling Deborah when I burst in to the room without a
newspaper. After eight hours of labor the contractions had
come farther and farther apart, then ceased. “The fetal
heart is showing signs of stress,” she said, grimly. “It
needs to come out, now.” The doctor had been worried ever
since Deborah checked in to the hospital with a fever and
dehydration. That meant she had an infection, one that was
moving dangerously fast since she'd felt fine the night
before.
“No drugs,” Deborah said sourly.
The doctor looked at me, then left us alone. I had a little
talk with Deborah about Mother Nature and the Law of Birth:
either the baby comes out or both die. She listened to my
spiritual rationalizations with a pissed-off look on her
face, then said, “Okay. I'll take the drug in an hour if
labor doesn't start up by itself. Okay?”
“Now.”
“Half an hour.”
“Ten minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
“Fine,” I said. “Fifteen.”
Tense time inched by. On the fifteen-minute mark the doctor
pulled the clanking IV over to her bed— good hard
contractions started up and pumped rhythmically away.
“Works every time,” the doctor said quietly.
A few hours later the head began to crown. Danger entered
the room. An essence of female so formless it could not
exist on this level of reality was within seconds of
emerging into form. Something would have to break.
Intuition stepped in like a Chinese warlord and asked me
for a commitment. I made it without thought or argument: If
anything broke it would be me.
I bent over Deborah's great belly, put one hand behind her
shoulders and with the other hand lifted up her leg. I
gently crunched her belly to her knees in time with her
beet-red-faced bearing-down. The intensity and the danger
increased with every pushing contraction. It felt like I
had recklessly committed my body and my life to function as
a bridge between Lilith and the breathable air—the head
slipped out—a blast of foulness ruptured the air. The room
filled with the stink of pestilence. I breathed through my
mouth so I wouldn't retch. The baby's head was covered with
pus. The doctor wiped the head then wiggled and pulled and
twisted the tiny body so forcefully I was scared she'd
break that little body. Lilith's shoulders slipped out—a
shock zapped the palm of each of my hands, raced up each
arm and met inside my heart with a electric flash—the baby
slithered out plop! into the doctor's hands and screamed in
mortal terror.
Lilith hung upside down by the heels. Her penis and balls
dangled down like trophies, lurid purple, grotesquely
enlarged from the hormones of late pregnancy. Lilith was a
boy. The room slid slantways dizzy—I gripped my guts,
forced breath. I will deal with this later I will deal with
this later I will deal with this later. I moved like a
robot, but I didn't faint.
A 3-person neonatal team appeared out of nowhere and moved
in like astronauts on a mission. Fluids were tested faster
than I could tell they were being extracted. The baby
surpassed all measurements for health, and Deborah's
temperature dropped to normal minutes after birth. The
placenta, smothered in noisome slime, was disposed of with
extreme caution in a BIOHAZARD container.
After everything had been checked and rechecked several
times, the doctor sat down with me and Deborah. “You didn't
have relations within the last few days, correct?” She'd
asked us that twice already. We assured her again that we
hadn't had sex for two weeks. “Then the infection must have
started spontaneously shortly before labor began. There's
no medical explanation for that, since there was no
penetration of the womb. So how did it get in there? Not
only that, in the last 8 hours Deborah's absorbed a
phenomenal 10 liters of fluid. I can't explain instant
dehydration of that severity. And finally, the infection
that could have been fatal to mother and fetus vanished at
birth. Only the placenta was infected. There's no medical
explanation for that, either.”
The doctor stared at us for a minute. “Well, I'm just glad
mother and baby are healthy,” she said, then left.
I had an explanation, although it wasn't medical: Something
too female to be born had found a way.
We called him Victor. We had no other name.